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I'm thinking 2 things:
How great it is that technology many years old gets us this.
How great it is that technology will not last long enough for humans to get out there, colonize and make a wreck of places like that, and we'll be able to look back in wonder at pictures like these.
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Posted: |
Jun 22, 2015 - 11:57 AM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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It's going to be interesting to see if both Pluto and Charon show evidence of mutally inflicted surface scarring, with some kind of frictional contact being the method of leaving them conjoined. If so, God not only plays dice, but snooker too!
If we don't get off the planet en mass at some stage, we are destined to wither away. The Sun is a third generation star. It's been around for something like 5000,000,000 years (about 1/3 the age of the Universe itself) and is about halfway through it's own lifespan. The Sun has more resources to burn than we have on the earth, relatively speaking. It's worth bearing in mind that complex biological entities, such as ourselves, require a prodigious quantity of energy with which to get by. We are curtailed by an ever constant problem. Please refer to the game of foxes and rabbits.
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Posted: |
Jul 3, 2015 - 5:52 PM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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You know what I'm thinking?
I'm thinking if the large circular splotches around Pluto's equator are in-plane with Charon's orbit, they are the smoking gun. They're the skid marks Charon made in a hop, hop, hop, scrape, scrape, scrape type contact while brushing against the larger object. Remember the Barnes Wallis bouncing bombs from WWII? This could have been the mechanism slowing Charon down from an excess of speed that would have caused it to take leave of Pluto. It's the brake that left Charon tied to Pluto in a fairly tight orbit. It might turn out to be something else, but WTF, I don't think so!
The other four moons take some explaining. If they, too, lie in the same (relatively speaking) plane as Charon then they are just fragments that broke off from Charon when it initially hit Pluto. It kind of makes sense. Each blow from one of the hops struck off fragments of Charon. Generally, the smaller pieces would get flung further out. Here's the important thing - when you have several objects initially trapped to a larger gravitational object, what tends to happen over time is the inter-gravitational pull acting between all the objects evens out their orbital motions into near circular, low eccentricity, ring-like pathways. Which is what we see today. The Plutoid system is one interesting randomly selected solar system balls-up in the making.
It's just like Valles Marineris on Mars, with the overhead leftover debris of Phobos and Deimos. Man, this finding is going to burn lots of midnight oil.
It remains to be seen if Charon itself has parallel scarring on it's surface to lend support to this idea. The fact that Charon is dark in color to Pluto's shades of brown suggests Charon's outer layered material smudged Pluto's surface from the edge-on ricochet effect of having made physical contact one hell of a long time ago - that's 32-bit technology for you!
And yes, this has implications for our Moon in a near-identical scenario. I once suggested that equivalent fragments that chipped off the Moon as it scraped past earth would have fallen back on to the Moon's surface at offset points to the largest impact site, which would have marked the area of the Moon taking that huge blow with earth. The reason we don't have any other smaller irregular moons in spread out orbits, as with Pluto and Mars, is because the Moon's stronger gravity-field pulled them all in, leaving the various maria as side by side footprints of the debris fields left over from chunks of molten rock that rained back down to the surface.
The evidence is mounting so beautifully. Jeez, if I had potato and papier-mache, I'd do a Roy Neary sculpture-par-extraordinaire for you guys.
In fact, the DM has a full rotation animation of the northern hemisphere. It looks like there's a streak that then leads to the three patches, with the fourth opening up to a long slide that tapers continuously for most of the distance around the planet. Looks like something either dug in and came to a crashing stop or finally broke contact with the surface. It's an extraordinary solar system landmark. A pity we can't see the entire surface:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3148809/What-white-alien-spots-Pluto-movie-dwarf-planet-reveals-mysterious-markings.html
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Posted: |
Jul 7, 2015 - 2:54 AM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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The blackout has given some pause for thought.
It looks to me as though Charon has come in at a very shallow angle and initially grazed the surface of Pluto. It lost a little bit of energy. Then it starts to skip, once, twice, thrice and on the fourth impact something of real significance happens. A larger sized chunk breaks off Charon due to the external pounding the outer crust has taken.
The part that might have broken off at this point saves Charon. Like the bullet of a gun leaving the chamber, the recoil effect pushes against the bulk of Charon with sufficient force to start it's deflection away from Pluto. If that event had not happened, Charon would have likely impacted Pluto with far more devastating consequences. Charon then leaves the surface more or less intact. The larger part which broke off, however, cuts a huge swathe across the surface of the planet. The downward acting force from detaching Charon causes it to break up, leaving material to fan out until it loses momentum and the dust settles.
So I think Charon lost a few "fingers," which flew off into orbit, and maybe a "foot" dug into the surface on it's close encounter with Pluto. Charon, however, lived to tell it's tale. Anyone got any thoughts?
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